Here's Amanda

Here's Russell

Here's Stuart

Playing cards

You know when you get a deck of cards in a Christmas cracker? That's cool.

Here's Thomas

Tossing horseshoes - now that is a good game!

Xanthe and Catriona

Here's Jonathan

Catriona's gift

Catriona starts training as a doctor next month. Tegan and Todd's gift is very appropriate!

Here's Tegan and Todd

They are getting married in Canada next New Year's Eve.

Here's Mitchell

Are you loving the bow? He was loving the bow.

Here's Connor

All the (Aussie) Laing grandchildren

Ron made all the kids line up in age order.

So, that's Tegan, Catriona, Connor, Jonathan, Thomas, Mitchell, Xanthe, Jessamy and James.

Merry Christmas from Perth

Yesterday (Christmas eve) we had a family barbecue by the river.

We had:
Nana and Pop
Jeff, me, and our kids
Stuart and his kids
Russell with Amanda, and his kids
Tegan with fiancé Todd

And I've tried for photos of everyone. So here goes...

Here's Ron and Elaine (Pop and Nana) enjoying the very convenient seating provided by Russell and Amanda.

In the background, Mitchell and Thomas. Thomas is doing a Rubik's cube. Of course.

A very nice picture of me.

Here's a picture of me. It's for a terribly good reason.

Anyway, how nice is the blind in my craft room?

Barbie gets distracted

Haven't had a lot of work out of my intern since Pokemon Go got released...

Office comfort

I see you've met my Dalek, Barbie. Yes, we all have a few toys and other office comforts.

Well, I do.

Now I think of it, I do seem to have more toys than anyone.

Barbie gets interrupted again

Ok, Barbie, I know you had your heart set on getting that bug fixed, but there's another interruption.

Our system gets translated into other languages. That means someone has to send the words off to the translators. That's me. Actually, it's the tech writer, but I give them to him.

But today's challenge is, a tester wants to test the translation. But we don't have the words back yet.

So I thought we could make some fake translations, half install them, run a compile, pull out the language files, and then undo all our changes. Then send those files to the tester. Will she work out how to install them, do you think?

Turns out yes, she did. Our tester has a Masters degree.

Were you keeping notes on all those procedures, Barbie? We'll probably have to do this again one day. That's right, keep those devices charged.

Barbie gets really fixing

So, we've stopped the error message. Problem solved? Nope, we need to work out what that missing code was supposed to do . Or rather, what the original code would have done if we had originally wanted to do the thing we now want to do. Yeah.

 

What should it do? Clue's in the name. It's named along the lines of "verb - noun", so I guess we just have to verb the noun.

Then it will be lunch time. Didn't you bring lunch? I did. But I do like to treat myself to a bought one sometimes. We rather like spicy Asian food around here. And cake.

Barbie, we are NOT having macarons for lunch. Oh, you were thinking of afternoon treats? Well, that's perfectly sensible.

Barbie gets fixing

Ok, Barbie, back to the original question. The problem is, it can't find a piece of code. So we need to either make the code be there, or make it stop looking.

 

Trying the first one … there we go, I've just added an empty thing that doesn't do anything. It means it won't find a gap. Can you test it for me, Barbie?

 

Yes, testing is your job! We test stuff about every five minutes.

Yes I have a lot of pens. I use them to mark up printouts. The different colours help me think. That one's a stylus too.

Barbie handles an interrupt

OK, Barbie, quick interruption. A tester just found an issue in a patch that's about to go out. But the boss suspects it's been there forever, and so do I.  Testers eh? They just test everything!

I've run through the steps. She's right, the thing does happen, but ... is it a problem?

Let's think about that. 

Shh, I'm thinking. That's part of the job. You think too.

Ok, I've thought about it, and I'm pretty sure this is just "interesting behaviour", not a fault.

Oh, look, I've found it on the issue tracking system - it was reported six years ago. By me. I think that proves that nobody will mind. Case closed!

Can you email all that to the boss? Yes, I know he's sitting right there. Official answers go in writing.